


Down In The Valley (With Whiskey Rivers)

by alienor_woods



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cabin Fic, F/M, Vignette series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-03-05 08:17:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13383855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienor_woods/pseuds/alienor_woods
Summary: After Clarke leaves Bellamy at Camp Jaha, she stumbles across a ramshackle cabin and decides to make it a home.In the light of day, Clarke circles around the cabin with a critical eye. The roof is collapsing on the left side, right over the bathroom that Clarke has no intentions of using any time soon, if at all. Windows are cracked or shattered in places, and ivy creeps up the chimney and the posts of the porch. Even with all its imperfections, it’s better than sleeping in the open woods. A few days of elbow grease would go a long way, she’s sure, and she gets to work.





	1. Lady Luck

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://alienor-woods.tumblr.com/post/117647700185/down-in-the-valley-with-whiskey-rivers-part-i) and revised for AO3.
> 
> Eventual Bellarke, but overall this is a character/aesthetic vignette exploration of "what if Clarke found a cabin in the woods and ended up not as alone as she'd thought she would be?"

She finds the cabin at twilight.

Fatigue and the nearly-gone daylight send Clarke tripping wildly on the stairs. The porch bites sharply into her knee and she feels a splinter rip into her palm when she catches herself on the weather-roughened wood. “Shit,” she mutters, and pushing back up onto her feet.

The small pane of glass in the door glints at her even in the dimness. Clarke wraps her good hand around the cold knob.  _Please be open_. The knob doesn’t even need to be twisted. It’s stuck, turned all the way to the left. The door swings inward about a foot when she jostles it with her shoulder. Something rustles on the floor when the door stops–leaves or branches or fabric, Clarke isn’t sure, not with night nearly here–and she has to give the door a firmer push to slip inside.

“Hello?”

A skitter to her left. Something small, with delicate nails that scrape at the wood. Clarke gives a grateful sigh because it’s nothing but a possum or a racoon, and one that’s happy to flee when a larger animal comes calling. It wiggles through an opening in the wall and into the darkness outside.

“ _Heya_?” she calls out again.

The only reply is the quiet forest noises beyond the open door at her back and the wind whispering its way through the cabin walls.

Clarke’s been sleeping under fallen trees and on dirt and in the crooks of tree roots. The hard floor and the idea of the creepy-crawlies that might be moving around on it don’t faze her in the slightest. She puts her back to the wall, tucks her knees into her chest, and closes her eyes.

–

She explores in the morning. It’s a four-room cabin: A front room with a fireplace and chimney, a dilapidated and dirty kitchen, a disgusting bathroom, and a serviceable bedroom with a sagging, naked mattress and rickety frame.

She passes her palm through a hundred years of dirt and pollen on the mirror over the dresser to see what she looks like after fifteen days in the mountains on her own. The cut on her nose has healed into a smooth red line. There’s a bruise on her jaw from a slip on a creek bank a few days ago, stretching sickly yellow-green all the way up to her cheekbone. She’s pleased to see that her skin is otherwise clean enough, since she’s made a point of scrubbing her skin every time she comes across running water.

Outside, in the light of day, Clarke circles around the cabin with a critical eye. The roof is collapsing on the left side, right over the bathroom that Clarke has no intentions of using any time soon, if at all. Windows are cracked or shattered in places, and ivy creeps up the chimney and the posts of the porch. Even with all its imperfections, it’s better than sleeping in the open woods. A few days of elbow grease would go a long way, she’s sure, and she gets to work.

The fireplace is the first order of business. Clarke kicks around in the weeds outside until she finds a big branch. She sticks it up the chimney and wiggles it around, hacking when dirt and leaves come cascading down in a plume of dust. Once she’s sure the chimney is clear of debris, though, it all makes for good tinder, and she has a cheery fire going before midday.

The apple tree out in the … Clarke doesn’t want to call it a yard, as overgrown as it is, but it’s the only word that suffices. In any case, the apple tree  _nearby_  provides her with her breakfast, her lunch, and her dinner. Her last meal had been two days ago: a handful of crayfish out of a stream and some wild onions. Her stomach (and her palate) is far happier being filled by crisp, clean fruit flesh.

It’s clear that the kitchen has been raided several times over. In the kitchen cabinets, she finds some leftover unrecognizable foods that she has no intentions of eating. She piles them into her arms and walks them out to the tree line, dumping them there for whatever scavenging rodents want at them. Wedged at the back of a drawer, behind an empty silverware tray, she finds a matching set of salt and pepper shakers. Clarke works them out and lifts the spices to her nose one at a time to take luxuriant, deep breaths. Even on Alpha station, salt had been strictly rationed. Abby had allowed only a pinch sprinkled over whatever bland food she had been cooked and sometimes they would go weeks without it. Pepper, though, Clarke has never tasted.  _What is the saying?_  she thinks, lifting the perforated plastic to her nose and sniffing again. _‘A castle for a peppercorn’?_  It smells fragrant and musky, and Clarke wants to try it as soon as she can.

The bedroom, too, has been ransacked. The mattress seems to have been deemed too heavy to take, but she doesn’t doubt grounders snatched up the missing sheets and blankets. The closet doors sit wide open, with some clothing still on hangers, and some lying in piles on the floor. Clarke crouches in front of the closet and picks through the heaps of fabric.

A woman had lived here, she realizes when her fingers trip over a floral pattern. She pulls the dress out of the pile and shakes it until it reveals its button-down placket and long skirt. It’s too thin to wear in this chilly weather, so she folds it and sets it aside. The men’s shirts are massive but wearable, so she peels off her grimy sweatshirt for a dusty-but-clean gray shirt.

As she picks through the drawers, Clarke decides that there hadn’t been much rhyme or reason to what had been taken by those that had come before her. Some drawers are completely empty, yet in others, she finds socks and underthings–the latter too large for her, but useful to someone, surely. The bottom drawer is  _teeming_  with sweatshirts and blankets. The only justification she can think of is that the grounders had to have come across the cabin in the summertime and left the cold-weather supplies for later.

Clarke shrugs and yanks at a blanket. “Better for me this way.” Nothing venomous jumps out at her and she finds something even more interesting wedged between two sweatshirts: An unopened bottle of whiskey.

“Finders, keepers,” she breathes.

–

That night, she hauls the table closer to the fireplace and sits on the edge with the open bottle of whiskey. Newly-socked feet swinging lightly, she takes two large, spicy, numbing swallows from the bottle, re-caps it, and sets it on the floor.

_“We’ll pass,”_  Wells had said, and Clarke had snatched the bottle from Finn.

_“I can be fun. You think I’m fun, right?”_

The flames in the hearth go all blurry when she lies down on the table and pulls the blanket up to her shoulders. That was back when Finn’s smile had been easy and light. Back when he’d smiled at all.

_“So, are we having fun yet?”_

 


	2. Chapter 2

“It looks good,” Lincoln tells her after he sticks his head into the attic and whacks at the posts of the porch. “The foundation’s sturdy enough.”

Clarke and Lincoln pulled their knives on each other from opposite sides of the big boulder down on the bank of the nearby stream. With a _trigedasleng_ curse, he wrapped his big arms around her and squeezed until she wheezed that she couldn’t breathe. He told her he’d just finished setting his snares so she invited him back to the cabin. He’d have followed her back, anyway.

“It’s survived a nuclear war,” Clarke says. Greedily, she licks the crumbs of squirrel jerky from her fingers.

His mouth tugs up in a small smirk and he leans against one of the front porch rails to squint up into the sun. “It’s been a hundred years since then, you know. I’m surprised that more than just the roof hasn’t collapsed.”

Clarke shrugs. “It leaks in a few places. That storm a few nights ago shattered the window in the bathroom. And I think there’s a possum family living in the crawlspace.”

They catch up over a glass of springwater and another length of jerky. He’s come out this far to give the animals around Camp Jaha a break, but she’s not as far away as she’d thought. Lincoln points southeast and says that the Camp is about a full-day’s walk in that direction. 

“So, two days for _skaikru_ , huh?” she asks, half joking, half hoping. He chuckles and shrugs noncommittally.

It’s been three weeks since the Mountain fell and almost everyone has healed from their wounds. Raven has a new brace. Abby manages her limp with a cane for now. Harper’s wounds have closed but she’s on bedrest for at least another week.

When the sun touches the treetops, Lincoln goes out to collect his snares. Clarke goes with him. He’s gotten a few rabbits and squirrels, and he makes her watch how he untangles the snares from their necks. One isn’t dead yet, since its leg got caught up in the wire, too. He starts explaining how to break the neck and the violent roll of her stomach takes her by surprise.

She turns and vomits, stopping him midsentence. She hears the quick, efficient crunch while she gasps, wipes at her face, tries to get a hold of herself without bursting into tears and screams.

Back at the cabin, she’s back to _Clarke Griffin, Capable And Certain._ She helps skin the rodents, gut them, and sever the limbs for travel. They turn a midsize jackrabbit over the hearth until the few flecks of fat crackle and sizzle. It’s Clarke’s first proper serving of meat in weeks (the crayfish she gets now and then don’t  _really_ count) and soft heat and give of it between her molars makes her moan.

Belly full, she watches Lincoln damp the fire and hang the rest of his catch inside the chimney to cure overnight. The last thing she remembers is his silhouette over the hearth and the scrape of stick on stone as he stirs the embers, and then—

* * *

 

she dreams of the mountain.

 

* * *

 

 

Lincoln shows her how to set snares the next day, and how to loosen them so she can let the not-dead animals run free.

“Monroe’s a good hunter,” he says as she sets a snare at the base of a fig tree. She’s asked after them, because the silence will come soon enough. “Harper too.”

“Not Octavia?”

Lincoln weighs his words before he says them. “Octavia is too forward for hunting. She’d rather fight a bear head-on than stalk it.”

She snorts. “Forward” is Octavia in a nutshell. “Makes sense why Bellamy did all of the hunting back at the drop ship, then.”

Lincoln looks over at her in surprise. “Bellamy hunts?”

Clarke returns the surprised glance. “He _doesn’t_ hunt?”

The leaves crunch under their feet. He weighs his words again, watching her from the corner of his eye. “I suppose he doesn’t have the time anymore.”

 _Why? What is he doing?_ The questions gather on her tongue, but she holds them back. _Is he alright?_   Lincoln probably wouldn’t give her a straight answer, anyway. _Is he sleeping?_ Grounders have a particular practice of talking in circles, Clarke has determined.

He helps her shell the shirtful of pecans she gathered a few days ago while they wait for animals to wander into the snares. Finn had showed them all how to do this, back when they’d first landed. Tracking, hunting, gathering–he’d known it all. He’d shown her the differences between poison berries and edible berries, and between the leaves that you can use for a pain-relieving tea and the leaves that would make you break out in a rash. At least half of what she’s used to survive the past few weeks on her own has been because of Finn, and…

…she can’t even thank him for it.

Only when she finishes her pecans does she realize that she’s been crying, but Lincoln only shakes his head when she mumbles an apology.

They collect the snares; he bundles them into a blanket he’d brought and looks towards Camp Jaha.

“You’re leaving? Now?”

Lincoln’s smile is rueful, looking up at her from the ground in front of the porch. “I can get a few hours in if I leave now. I don’t want the meat to sour just so I can have a roof over my head.” Clarke purses her lips, worrying. “I’ll be fine Clarke. I’ve been living here my whole life, remember?”

“Tell them I’m alright, will you?” she asks, words spilling over her lips. He nods in agreement. “My mom and Kane will want to know I’m alive. And…Bellamy, too.”

Lincoln doesn’t seem to wear his grounder kohl anymore, so Clarke can see more clearly than she would have before when his eyes flicker from her face to the cabin, to the treeline, and back. “He thinks about you a lot, you know. Bellamy.”

Clarke’s eyes flick away from Lincoln, now, and when she’s able to settle them again, he’s already turned and started down the little path her feet have started to lay down in the weeds.

Clarke never asked about the other grounder tribes.

Lincoln never mentioned them.

 

* * *

 

she dreams of the ring of fire.

 


	3. Chapter 3

The sun’s already sunk behind the treetops when Clarke steps outside after dinner. She tosses the scraps from her plate over the porch railing, knowing full well it’ll draw raccoons and possums near. It doesn’t bother her. She feels a kinship with with little scavengers, actually, and doesn’t mind gifting them her leavings.

 

Fingers of pinky gold creep across the sky towards the stretch of heavy indigo in the east. The whirr of insects has thinned after a few nights of light frost. There are a few survivors out in the meadow, purring to each other, and nightbirds singing out lullabies.

 

She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. An evening breeze brushes against her cheeks, cools the sweat on the back of her neck that an honest day of work has built up. 

 

She smells...the meadowgrass. The staleness of standing water leftover from the midday rain. The mustiness of the log that’s gone to rot at the southern treeline. The smoke sputtering up and out of her chimney. She feels the night’s chill sharpening its blades, the heaviness of night settling into her bones.

 

She’ll never,  _ ever _ get tired of it. Of nature. Life. The sky, the days and nights, the stars, the moon, the slow death of the trees around her in shades of fiery red and gold.

 

Clarke opens her eyes--

 

\--and there he is.

 

Just across the meadow, right inside the treeline, stock still on the path that she knows--in theory--leads to Camp Jaha. The daylight is fading, but she knows Bellamy Blake. His not-quite-wavy, not-quite-curly hair, the slope of his shoulders, the way he likes to settle his weight into the heel of his left boot. He’s clearly come to see her, specifically undertaken a day-long trek to where she lives now...yet he looks just as stunned to see her as she is to see him.

 

She raises her hand. Waves.

 

A sign of life. He lifts his hand from his rifle, and starts walking again.

 

It’s been weeks...months, really, since she’s seen him. He doesn’t wave again, or call out to her as he picks his way towards the cabin on the uneven ground.

 

He stops in front of her, eye-level with her just two steps down from her porch.

 

“Hey,” she greets him.

 

“Hey.” He’s in some sort of uniform. Dark jacket, dark cargo pants, a patch on his shoulder and the semiautomatic rifle slung across his chest.

 

She takes in the shadows under his eyes, his windburned, unsmiling mouth, his dehydrated skin. “You look exhausted.”

 

Bellamy’s eyes flick to her sundress and bare feet, then back to her face. “You don’t,” he replies, flatly, the shock she’d glimpsed having faded to  _ tired _ and  _ annoyed _ .

 

Well. Alright, then.

 

It’s not quite the greeting she’s gotten from the small handful of others who’d made their way to see her. Miller’d surprised her with a bear hug, Monty’d slipped her some weed, Kane came with a letter from a bedridden Abby in hand. But she and Bellamy had also parted on...different terms.

 

She clears her throat. “Do you want to...come in?” she offers, sweeping her hand towards the door in a tight, awkward circle.

 

His eyes skirt her edges, trace the cabin’s roofline and chimneystack.

 

He nods, once. An owl hoots closeby. Clarke’s attention snaps to the woods, then back, and Bellamy’s  _ there _ again. Stepped up onto the patio in the heartbeat between, toe-to-toe, nose-to-broad-chest.

 

She turns on her heel, takes a bracing breath, and leads the way. 

 

***

 

_ Come inside _ , he begs.  _ Please, come inside _ .

 

***

 

No backpack. No canteen. No sleep roll. He’d gotten to her cabin on just what the others had told him and the compass on his rifle.  _ That  _ she directs him to hang up on the hooks above the door.

 

She pours a glass of water. He sucks it down. And the next one. 

 

He’s still antsy, distracted, so she gives him a few more minutes of quiet. She waits until he starts wandering the main room, fiddling with the rocks and shells and knick knacks she’s placed on the bare shelves and mantel. “No one knows you’re here, do they, Bellamy?”

 

“I had night patrol last night. Ten to six. The sun came up and I thought I’d take a walk to the dropship,” he says by way of answer. He braces his hands on her creaky windowsill and peers out through the glass panes she’s wiped as clean as she can. Looks to see what she can see. His mouth is finally curved with the hit of a wry smirk when he glances back at her over his shoulder. “And I just...kept walking.”

 

“Have you eaten?”

 

“No.” 

 

“You need to eat something. I have some jerky from Miller’s visit…”

 

He thumbs at the corner of the mantel. “I thought the whole point was to be  _ alone _ ,” he says, dark and sharp all at once again.

 

“It’s not like I  _ asked _ him for it,” she snaps, slapping a few strips into his palm. “Now eat. You need the calories.”

 

The muscle in his jaw jumps at her bossy tone, but he also doesn’t throw her rations back in her face.  _ Good enough _ , she thinks, dropping into one of the chairs pulled up to the fire.

 

Finally face-to-face after months, and they’re both too worn out--her from her afternoon hauling debris out of the attic, him from the miles he’s walked--that when they finally start talking, it’s in sharp jabs and rapid parries.

 

“You said we were going to do this  _together_ .”

 

“ _You_ said that, Bellamy, not me.”

 

“You weren’t going to do it without me!”

 

He’s right. She shoves a stick at the logs and pivots. “If it’s exhausting you so much you could leave, too.”

 

He spits his reply at her. “Are all only children so selfish or is it just you?”

 

The barb pierces her heart, buries itself deep inside. The rest of the delinquents--only children, all of them, save for Octavia--are back at Camp Jaha, with Bellamy.

 

A jar of Monty’s moonshine sits on the small table she’s pulled beside her makeshift bedroll. She unscrews the lid and pours a finger into the little cup beside it, tosses it back.

 

It leaves a burning trail down her throat, one that’s barely soothed by his softened voice. “I can’t leave them, Clarke. Things are...rough with the grounders. I’m not gonna leave our people when I can help protect them.”

 

“That’s because you’re a good person, Bellamy,” she tells him, and meets his eyes so he knows she means it. “Better than me.”

 

She offers him the cup, a fresh pour of moonshine sloshing in the bottom. He accepts it, swallows it with only the slightest grimace. He’s used to unfettered access to Monty’s drinks, whereas Clarke has to ration hers carefully.

 

He drops his wrist over the arm of the couch and idly turns the empty cup in his fingers. He eyes her, sitting on the other side of the freshly-beaten rug, his frustration turning to confusion and despair each time she blinks.

 

“You asked me to come back with you once, because you needed me,” he says, voice so quiet under the fire and forest sounds she has to actively pay attention. “You said you couldn’t do it without me. You wanted to help them, then. Why won’t...Why won’t you do the same for me, for  _ them _ , now, huh?”

 

“Things were different back then,” is all she can manage.  _ Different _ . They’d just been scared kids taking care of other scared kids, thinking their only worries were a few goblins in the dark of the woods. 

 

The flares, Anya, Trikru, the Ring of Fire, Lexa, the Mountain...that had all come  _ after _ .

 

How easy it had all seemed back then. Manageable. Do-able.

 

She’d been a fucking idiot.

 

She glances back at Bellamy. His eyes focus on the low flames in her hearth; the lower rims shimmer with unshed tears. “You said you couldn’t lose me again, Clarke.”

 

“I haven’t  _ lost _ you.” Her voice is coaxing. Pleading. “I know right where you are.”

 

He scoffs. Pushes to his feet and crosses the room towards the back door, nearly shattering the cup when he slams it back down on her nightstand.

 

***

 

He doesn’t go far, just jumps off her back porch and stalks towards the edge of the clearing. The air in the cabin had gotten thick, claustrophobic. He needs to clear his head, get some ground between the two of them before--

 

\--before  _ what _ ?

 

A sudden urge to sprint tickles his neck, but he just strides towards her woodpile. He notes the small stock, detatched, analytical, rational, and stalks himself back to her porch. Clarke’s standing at the edge, mouthing his name.

 

She’s smaller than he remembered. She’s  _ softer _ than he remembered. 

 

He grabs her axe from where it’s been leant against the stair, and heads back to the chopping block.

 

Clarke calls after him, her voice less heard than felt in his bones and guts. His blood pounds in his ears. The night air chills his cold sweat. He hauls out a log from her ramshackle pile, hefts the axe, and swings it down.

 

***

 

It’s a long time before he’s done with her woodpile. She busies herself with scraping together food for the both of them. The rigor mortis of the hare she’d caught that morning has finally softened, so she cleans and spits it and sets it over the hearth to cook. Some more of Miller’s jerky for Bellamy, since he’d been walking all day and would be walking soon again. A small plate of apple rings she’d dried herself.

 

The thunking finally stops. A few more minutes and the door swings open on its creaking hinges. His jacket’s been lost along the way--probably slung aside in a fit of pique--and his henley is soaked down the chest with sweat. He meets her eyes, then circles them down to the spread on the table, the dance of flames in the hearth.

 

He walks the armload of wood across the main room, drops it on top of the last two logs she’d been rationing for tonight and tomorrow morning. The hare is nearly done, dripping sweet fat that pops in the flames, and Bellamy gives it one last turn to even it out.

 

“Thanks,” she murmurs.

 

She hears him come up behind her, but she doesn’t stop in pouring out two fingers of Monty’s moonshine for each of them. His hands settle on her shoulders, and  _ that _ makes her startle. 

 

“Bellamy--”

 

His arms slide the rest of the way around. He tugs her tight against his chest, and drops his head to press alongside her own. He’s damp with sweat, smells like...like he’s been chopping wood for an hour, but his embrace makes tears well in her eyes all the same. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, Clarke. None of this is your fault. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

 

She rests a hand over his forearms, where they cross across her collarbones, and leans back into him. He takes the weight easily. He always has. His head follows hers when it rolls to the side, and he rocks her in that direction, then back to the other side. 

 

“You’re already forgiven,” she tells him, and it’s the truth.

 

***

 

They eat wordlessly, and they drink wordlessly, and his eyes are at half-mast by the time they finish the apple rings. She directs him to the wash basin and rolls out her blankets while he wipes himself down.

 

Together, they bed down on the floor in front of the fire, conspicuously fully-dressed and facing away from each other. His breathing goes heavy and steady within minutes of his head falling onto on the makeshift pillow, but Clarke stays awake a little while longer. She listens to the birds, the insects, anything but the the deep breathing of the man beside her.

 

Yet--

 

\--sometime in the dark of the night, after the fire’s burned low and the birds have tucked themselves into their crooked branches, Clarke’s eyes blink open.

 

Bellamy’s awake too, his eyes glittering in the dark. He breathes her name, and reaches up a hand to tuck a curl behind her ear. “I miss you,” he tells her, like he’s letting her in on a secret.

 

She traces his arm, feels the cords of his muscles under her fingertips, lets herself indulge in the privacy of the dark and slip her fingers under his shirt. His skin is smooth at his waist. She knew it would be. “I miss you, too.”

 

He leans in, natural and easy as can be, and kisses her. Just once. He runs the pad of his thumb along her cheekbone, over the whorls of her ear, down her jawline. “Come back with me.”

 

Clarke’s smile is small, ephemeral, but he feels it under his palm all the same. “Stay with me.”

 

***

 

He’s gone in the morning.

 

It’s alright. She knows where he is...and now he knows where she is.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated.


End file.
